Bionic neurons are on the horizon! A group of University of Bath scientists has reproduced the electrical properties of biological neurons onto semiconductor (silicone) implantable chips. The artificial neurons could be the solution to so many conditions! For example, they can be used to bypass nerve damage and help paralyzed patients regain movement or send a sense of touch to the brain from a prosthetic limb.
The scope for its usefulness in medical devices is truly enormous. The chips can also be used to cure anything from neuronal degeneration (diseases such as Alzheimer’s) to chronic diseases such as heart failure. Someday they may even be used to connect the mind to a machine.
Alain Nogaret, a physicist who led the project, said:
Any area where you have some degenerative disease, such as Alzheimer’s, or where the neurons stop firing properly because of age, disease, or injury, then, in theory, you could replace the faulty bio-circuit with a synthetic circuit.
The artificial neurons are built into small microchips, a few millimeters wide, that require a minuscule amount of power. Devices to be implanted will be made up of these bionic neuron chips. Such a device would plug straight into the nervous system to intercept signals that pass between the brain and the problem region.
The bionic neurons can obtain electrical signals from healthy nerve cells and then naturally process them. Then, they send new signals to other neurons or organs and muscles elsewhere in the body. For instance, a device made with these chips would intercept signals coming from the brain, process them, then send them to the legs muscles so a person could walk.
The “eureka moment” came to the researchers when they managed to model live neurons in a computer program, then recreate their firing patterns in silicon chips with above 94% accuracy. The team then used the program to mimic the entire variety of neurons contained in the nervous system.
The neurons were modeled after data recorded from two types (from the hippocampus) of rat neurons. They had stimulated the neurons in a dish to capture their firing patterns. The research has been published in the journal Nature Communications.
The researchers are confident they can now build bionic neurons based on any of the real nerve cells found in the spinal cord, brain, or the peripheral nervous system thanks to this program. The bionic neurons can send and receive signals so they can be used to make devices that respond to any neural feedback signals.
Co-author of the study, Julian Paton, who holds posts at the Universities of Bristol and Auckland, said:
The potential is endless in terms of understanding how the brain works, because we now have the fundamental understanding and insight into the functional unit of the brain, and indeed applications, which might be to improve memory, to overcome paralysis and ameliorate disease. They can be used in isolation or connected to form neuronal networks to perform brain functions.
When the development has finally passed all the trials and regulations, its first application will likely be to treat a form of heart failure that develops when a particular nerve circuit (located at the base of the brain) degenerates due to disease or age and doesn’t send the necessary signals to make the heart pump correctly.
